>>>Are you saying you would recommend COBOL or Fortran development today?
>>
>>FWIW, my physicist kid had to learn some ForTran for customizing one of the tools he uses, can't remember which.
>>
>
>COBOL, probably ;-)

No, it was definitely Fortran (77, I think) because I offered him books from my shelf, and I've never learned any COBOL.


>Fortran was the first computer language I learned. It was purely out of interest in this newfangled computer stuff, didn't count any more toward my graduation than elective credits. IMO we tend to underrate the power of randomness in our lives. What if we had chosen one course, picked up one book instead of another? What if we had called up one person instead of another to ask them out on a date on a whim?

I think Fortran was my second. When I took Intro to Programming my sophomore year (like you, on a whim), the Computer Science department was teaching PL/C. By the time I was teaching there a few years later as a grad student, we were teaching Pascal. By then, I'd picked up a little bit of quite a few languages (though I haven't used any of them in eons except for a little Pascal to customize an InnoSetup script).

Tamar